You're absolutely right about Europe being different. Last I heard, France currently gets around 2/3 to 3/4 of its power from nuclear. No wonder they have so much experience left over to build reactors for other countries (coughcough THE MIDDLE EAST coughcough).
I found the report below. For 1999, the figure on page 1 shows (to my uncalibrated eye) that France got a little less than 1/2 of its energy from nuclear. What's impressive is that their use of fossil fuels decreased in the 90s and leveled off.
http://earthtrends.wri.org/pdf_library/country_profiles/Ene_cou_250.pdf